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India's Message to America Certain of your missionaries have informed you wrongly of our history and condition, of our moral stature and of our religion. It is because they have studied us from the outside, and with eyes blinded by prejudice, the result of limited view of the universal cult, the universal law of brotherhood and love. We attribute these wrong impressions and wrong conjectures not to spite, malice or evil purpose, but ignorance, to a lack of knowledge, which a larger plane of universal brotherhood will cause to disappear. When missionaries who are sent from this continent to our country and to our people shall learn that we are children of the same family, that we inherit the same perceptions, the same rights, the same inspirations and the same relations to Infinite, and when they seek to fraternize with us on that plane and with, this recognition – then, and then only, antagonism and injustice will cease and the bonds of common brotherhood will unite us in a mutual recognition of reasons for a perfect fellowship.
You can bring us no new revelation, but you can recognize in us the old and everlasting truth which is the common birthright of all souls, which is only new to you because you are the latest born. If, in the freshness and innocence of your zeal and limited knowledge of us, you conceive us to be idolaters, bowing down to stone and metal gods made by our own hands, it is because you have as yet failed to grasp our conception of the simple and natural aids to faith to, contemplation, to apprehension and to duty, through which all souls must climb, as up the eternal stair of progress, from height to height, from lowest conditions through all grades to regeneration and liberation, and up to the perfect state. But despite all this, to-you we confidently look for that recognition of truth in us which shall lead to the universal fellowship which the law of universal brotherhood implies.
We come gladly, at your invitation, for another reason. You are the most tolerant and liberal nation in the Western world and tolerance is the first article in the faith of every Hindu, Buddhist or
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